I am going to pull my soap-box out again and comment on the latest controversy that I've been reading about in the news. In recent years we've all been chastized and called upon to change certain words and phrases and become 'more politically correct' in our speech and comments. Even the church has been required to make changes in their dialogue and expressions. I am not totally against all of the changes, because some terms and phrases are a little more refined and a little kinder. The Holy Ghost became The Holy Spirit, the 'garbage man' became a Sanitation Worker, a chairman became a chairperson, mailman a mail person. We made changes in the names we use for different nationalities: Irish are no longer Micks, Chinese are no longer Chinks,Japanese,no longer Japs, Germans, no longer Krauts.When I was growing up many of my friends were of Italian descent and the ones from Northern Italy were called Wops and the ones from Southern Italy were called Dagos. My friend used to call her big brothers Wops when she was mad at them. They frequently called other classmates, Dago or Wop depending on which part of Italy their parents were from. None of those words are used today, and that's a good thing!
If I were to write a book about my life as a child and teenager before World War ll, if the book truly reflected that time in history, I would be bound to use many of the terms that were commonly used at that time. I would relay the fact that when we walked the six blocks to our Catholic School we passed many of the students of the public school going the other way,to the public school. We had an on-going verbal exchange with them. They stayed on one side of the street and we stayed on the other as we passed each other. They chanted "cat-lickers, cat-lickers" (Catholics) and we chanted back "pot-lickers,pot-lickers" (Protestants). It was not unusual for us to play with the 'pot-lickers' after school but in that little slice of time we got great satisfaction from our name calling duel.That would not happen in today's world but it did in mine. I would have to write the actual fact to tell it like it was.
Fast forward to today's time. When we were choosing a novel for our eighth graders to read about ten years ago the other teacher and I chose "Of Mice and Men" by John Stienbeck. It is a classic that tells of an era in our history that has been read down through the years and will be read for many years to come. The values dealt with in the book are many and values that a group of eighth grade boys need to learn, compassion, empathy and duty. If you have ever read the book you may well know that the language used is in the vernacular. It is the everyday language commonly used by the itenerants of that time in the community that is being written about.
Before we went forward with our plans to read the book, we wrote a letter to each and every parent and aprized them of the profanity that we would be exposing the students to and gave them a summary of the book and our plans for telling the students how to deal with the language. The parents were asked to sign the letter and to voice their approval or dissproval of the choice of that book. We received all of the letters back, signed and approved by the parents.
We spent one whole class explaining why the author used that language and told them they were not expected to read aloud the profanities and gave them a choice of just skipping the words or using a euphemism. We were quite impressed with the euphemisms they chose. Dag-nabbit,gol-derned, dog-gonned and many others. The book lost none of its impact and they were unabashed at the end of the book to weep together with their classmates and teachers.
My soap box piece concerns the people that want to take the N-word out of Mark Twain,s book about Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain wanted to expose the vitroil of that era in history, he wanted to emphasize the hatred,the cruelty, the ignorance of the populace at that particular time. Why can't the teachers talk with the students in advance of reading that selection and help them understand the connotation of the word "nigger'? Slave, that they want to replace the word with, carries a totally different connotation. Please let Mark Twain get his point across! It was his intent to expose the hatred and unfairness of the accepted behavior of that time in history. Do not change his words and thereby water down his intent. Ciao
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